Question

I run a few side blogs that I sort of aggregate into my main blog.
I use simplepie to parse the feeds from my other blogs, so the posts are being created automatically.

My typical post is layed out like this:

1. IMAGE
2. CONTENT/TEXT
3. HYPERLINK

What I’m looking to do is automatically grab the hyperlink, and insert it into a Custom Field. The custom field already exists in the post, but I need to insert the hyperlink contained in the post content as the value.

I would need just the link, without the html, so the value would be just a straight link – http://domain.com/fsdds

I know there are a number of plugins that accomplish this with images, but I haven’t seen anything that will do it with anything else, like hyperlinks.

I posted this question over at the WordPress forums and was told I’d have to parse the entire post content looking for the links, which I knew, the problem is I’m not too sure how to do that.

Thanks

Answer 1

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Building on Anthony’s answer, use the UPDATE POST META once you have your link…

Put this in your functions.php file:

function catch_that_link() {
      global $post, $posts;
      $first_link = '';
      ob_start();
      ob_end_clean();
      $output = preg_match_all('/(https?://)?(www.)?([a-zA-Z0-9_%]*)\b.[a-z]{2,4}(.[a-z]{2})?((/[a-zA-Z0-9_%])+)?(.[a-z])?/', $post->post_content, $matches);
      $first_link = $matches [1] [0];

      if(empty($first_link)){ //Defines a default image
        return 'no link found';
      }
      return $first_link;
    }

Then in your query loop, category file or whatever php file you would do the following

<?php 

$post_id = 13; //replace the number with the specific post
$meta_key = 'key_example' //replace with your custom field name
$meta_value = catch_that_link();

update_post_meta($post_id, $meta_key, $meta_value); 
?>